On Friday, as many Americans were clamoring for discounts at big box stores, the federal government released an alarming report on the impacts of human-caused climate change, some of which are predictive, others described are already here.

The report warns that climate-fueled disasters -- like the recent California wildfires and the powerful hurricanes that ripped parts of Florida and the East Coast earlier this year -- will be more intense and more frequent unless "substantial and sustained" reductions to greenhouse gas emissions are rapidly put in place.

These disasters "have already become more frequent, intense, widespread or of long duration," the report said, and the costs associated with those damaging weather events, nearly $400 billion nationally since 2015, have risen as well.

In Oregon, if you want to see what the future looks like, all you have to do is look a few years into the past, said Phil Mote, an Oregon State University professor who helped assemble the report's Pacific Northwest section. In 2015, high temperatures and low precipitation decimated the state's snowpack, leading to a cascade of effects around the region.

"It seems that nature offered this teaching moment for the region," Mote said. "It serves as an exemplar of the future."

2015 and the new abnormal

In Oregon, 2015 was the hottest year, on average, since records began in 1895. Temperatures were 3.4 degrees higher than the 1970-1999 average.

Winter saw average temps more than 6 degrees above the nearly 30-year norm and precipitation was scarce. It didn't snow much in the Cascades and, when it did, that snow melted quickly. Oregon's snowpack in 2015 was 89 percent below average.